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Table of Contents |
Meeting Purpose
- The OSD meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meeting. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
- This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre and is generally text chat only.
- Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.
Official Viewer Status
- Default viewer – One-Click Installer – 26.1.1.23806384790 – April 10 – No change.
- Second Life Release Candidate (RC) viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.25386466510, May 15 -“flat” UI and font update – NEW.
- Second Life Project Viewers – Lua Editor Alpha viewer 6.1.0.23768336784, April 29..
26.2.0 – “Flat UI”
- A new beta RC was issued on May 14th – see the list above for details.
- Unless a significant blocker arises, this viewer is likely to be promoted in week #21 (commencing Monday, May 18th, 2026).
26.3.0 – Performance Improvements +
- 26.3 is still in progress. The new texture streaming updates should be merged already.
- Work is continuing on getting the async inventory updates included.
- Geenz Linden is working to get the new material and texture batching work in a good state for it as well.
- A beta /RC viewer should be appearing on the Alternate Viewers page “soon”.
26.3.1 Maintenance Update
- The second of the maintenance viewer updates – bug fixes, etc., – is now in preparation.
- Expect to see this appearing on the Alternate Viewers page “soon” as well.
Graphics Care Package Viewer
- This is somewhat “on hold” at present, but work will hopefully resume in the near future, as there are a number of bug reports stacking up.
- There is a reported mirror breakage within the GCP viewer.
Linux Support
- Linux support in the official viewer is to return with the Lua viewer.
- LL is targeting the more common Linux systems for support.
- There is a noted issue with Linux systems without PulseAudio crashing WebRTC versions of the viewer. It has been requested that the WebRTC SDK is fixed to correct this issue, or to provide fallback code PulseAudio to ALSA.
- It was noted that is a patch or PR was supplied to address this issue, LL would consider it, but LL currently doesn’t have the internal resources to implement a fix themselves.
WebRTC Update
- As noted in recent user group meeting summaries, WebRTC is now grid-wide and Vivox is effectively retired for Voice. So those using voice on a Vivox-only viewer will now need to update to a WebRTC-capable viewer.
- WebRTC updates will continue as required, and deployments are carried out separa6tely to the week grind simulator deployment / restarts.
- Viewers running the latest client-end of WebRTC should not be affected by this, as they they will disconnect from one voice server in the cluster ahead of it going down for update, and automatically reconnect to an operating server in the cluster.
- In terms of updates, currently the WebRTC team is updating the 3p-webrtc-build branch, and is hoping to look at a code contribution that will enable them to support more recent versions of WebRTC.
- A patch has also been forwarded to the team to deal with a Linux viewer freeze at shutdown in WebRTC. This also has yet to be looked at.
- No decision has been taken as to any new capabilities will be added to WebRTC going forward, although voce-to-text transcription (with the potential for multi-language support) remains on the list.
General Discussion
- LL is retiring the use of the Opire bounty platform for viewer development code bounties.
- The major reason for this is that it has led to a spate of bot-generated submissions, many of which are not related to any of bounties, causing headaches in trying to identify valid bounty code submissions.
- The bounty programme is being re-thought rather than discontinued, and further updates on changes to the bounty programme will be made public once they have been agreed and are available.
- A discussion on an approach to mirrors for Linden Water, including:
- A suggestion that 512×512 mirrors could be used to achieve the required results with less VRAM usage.
- Geenz Linden’s view that mirror probes are currently exposed as a texture array, which needs to be of uniform size, unless bindless, which doesn’t work for Mac OS (until LL moves to a more modern API such as Metal Vulkan). However, he is considering making an exception to the need for the uniform size requirement for a special Water probe type, with its own sampler – although a problem here is the viewer is close to the limit of samplers for Mac OS.
- Requests have been made to update the official support for CEF to a more recent version. There is an internal project to update CEF / Dullahan within the official viewer.
Next Meeting
- 13:00 SLT, Friday, May 29th, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 